Currently, aerospace manufacturers are forced to view, schedule, and manage tasks by using a combination of paper and short handwritten notes (e.g. sticky notes). This method of schedule display is known as a bar chart. A series of tasks is laid out on a horizontal “bar” and people's names are assigned to the bar or individual tasks.
This paper-based method of viewing, scheduling, and managing shop floor tasks has the following limitations.
An external system may be used to initiate changes to task schedules and changes to allotment of resources. These changes are not reflected in the paper-based method until the task management information is manually updated.
The manual configuration of data display in the paper-based method is prone to error. The error may be in the manual notation and/or the error may be in the interpretation by the reader where the displayed data is often short and abbreviated.
The manual configuration of data display in the paper-based method is time consuming and inefficient.
Critical data is not displayed in a timely manner in the paper-based method and critical data is only available in a single location.
The manual configuration of data display in the paper-based method does not prevent logical errors such as scheduling a task for a date/time in the past or a time that is not available due to shop schedule. In a like manner, unavailable resources may be assigned to a task.
Furthermore, inserting a new task into a time slot currently used by another task does not automatically reschedule affected tasks in the paper-based method. The manual rescheduling is prone to logical errors (similar to the above), is time consuming and inefficient (as previously mentioned).